"This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J R Miller's Practical Gamekeeper."posted by Paul Slade at 2:07 PM on March 13 [30 favorites]

Regarding the review of Anne of Green Gables, I don’t think the point of the book is so much that Anne changes, but that she changes the lives of those around her, especially Matthew and Marilla.posted by elphaba at 3:31 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

The one about Salinger seems not wrong. And I sympathize with the response to Heller.

Somewhere in my files, I have a late-Victorian book review that says something to the effect of "Mrs. Humphry Ward* will be remembered when George Eliot has been justly forgotten." It has always been a useful guard against hubris.

*--all those who are not Victorianists and recognize Mrs. Ward, raise your hand; all those who are Victorianists and have read Mrs. Ward, also raise your handposted by thomas j wise at 3:35 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

“It is a book one can very well get along without reading.” - Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser

As much as I love books, and reading, and the reading of books...well, that's most if not all books, really.posted by The Card Cheat at 3:44 PM on March 13 [3 favorites]

The only thing snobbier than aggressively declaring the essential greatness of some well-known critical favorite is aggressively declaring its essential mediocrity.

Of course, the ne plus ultra of snobbery is the "a pox on both your houses" bit.posted by kewb at 4:32 PM on March 13

I think I should be able to say that I dislike Catcher in the Rye without being accused of snobbery.posted by Chrysostom at 4:48 PM on March 13 [7 favorites]

“There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”

Yeah that’s the most accurate description of Lolita I’ve ever read.

It’s only now, after having written somewhere around twenty books, that I have some idea of where he went very wrong, story-wise, but even as a high school kid it was apparent that he hit the second act droop and had no idea how to recover. That thing is a slog, and it is repulsive the whole sloggy way through.

If you just gave me that pull quote and asked what famous book the critic was describing, I'd guess it in a second. I've been educated enough to appreciate it, but learned enough to say with confidence: fuck Ulysses.

Example: "We find Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a fearful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band and the patience of the audience to a severe trial..." -- The Harmonicon, London, 1825posted by nikoniko at 12:35 AM on March 14

Can I just say that I'm sorry for all the scat stuff in Gravity's Rainbow? it was a bit much. I regret it.

I quite like Ulysses, although Finnegan's Wake is probably more fun. Different strokes I guess. I'm always surprised that critics who didn't like the conceit got far enough in to understand the dirty bits.

The rest of these are spot-on, excepting the inclusion of Darwin, which is clearly trolling.

I'd like to see more with influential books that aren't novels, say, Freud.posted by aspersioncast at 8:17 AM on March 14

Different strokes I guess.

I remember back in the dawn of time getting into a dispute with my high school journalism teacher about "Catch 22". I loved the book and he, well, didn't. "It's all one joke!", he lamented. We didn't have the annoyingly useful and eloquent "Duh!" as an adolescent retort at the time, but, yeah.posted by Chitownfats at 10:11 PM on March 14

OK. So let;'s talk about this. Why did Catcher in the Rye become a celebrated book, after all (at least in some quarters)? That's especially odd given that at least one major publication essentially panned it. Is it a keen portrait of adolescent disaffection, an indulgent and insufferable text that reflects the way privileged adults misunderstand the experiences of younger generations, a scathing rebuke to another kind of privilege? All or none of the above?

Or Ulysses, for that matter. Yeah, Joyce had that remark about devising a puzzle box for the professors, but why did the professors take the bait, and why so many of them over so many generations? And the book itself is odd: it can be read as (among other things) an argument for pacifism, an argument for the ordinary person's innate dignity, an argument that a relationship between two adults matters a lot more than the self-Romanticization of a would be "great artist," but and yet is written in a way many people legitimately, understandably find exclusionary, even willfully so.

So the article is sort of inherently interesting. It's taking the position that these were "wrong calls," since these books were canonized. But it's also, I think playing to a cultural moment in which all of that is deeply in question, in which older "cultural consensus" is increasingly analyzed for the sham of privilege that it was, a great popular reassessment of older modes of cultural reproduction and their bigotries.

Does that make these books part and parcel of the racist, sexist, heteronormative cultural formations within which they were first elevated, and which brandished them like weapons for so long? Or does it mean that they must reframed, rethought, identified in terms of how they fit into a more heterogenous, maybe a more atomized or contingent model of cultural participation and engagement?posted by kewb at 7:21 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

I actually love Catch-22, I just think the review is also accurate.posted by aspersioncast at 9:04 AM on March 15

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